Day: May 29, 2007

Cindy Sheehan’s Parting Shot

Trish

Almost from the beginning, I had mixed feelings about Cindy Sheehan. I say “almost” because back at the very beginning, before I read anything she said or wrote and only heard there was a mother of a fallen soldier protesting the Iraq Occupation, I thought, “Wow, that’s wonderful.”

What Sheehan said or did never moved me precisely because of the way she said and did it.

But when I got more exposure to the actual person — through the press of course — I had my doubts. I felt I had met Cindy, and one-issue crusaders like her were the reason I got out of party politics. I found it much more fulfilling to work with individual candidates because at every party meeting, there was a Cindy or two who caused a complete and utter logjam with their inability to see shades of gray or look on compromise solutions as anything but defeat. Everything was a zero sum game to them.

I think all of our hearts go out to Sheehan for the loss of her son and for her determination not to back down. But admiration and liking are two different things. She’s a hard person to like.

Take, for example, her pity party today in which she both announced she’s quitting her protest of the Occupation and lashed out at every single American except herself.

I have spent every available cent I got from the money a “grateful” country gave me when they killed my son and every penny that I have received in speaking or book fees since then. I have sacrificed a 29 year marriage and have traveled for extended periods of time away from Casey’s brother and sisters and my health has suffered and my hospital bills from last summer (when I almost died) are in collection because I have used all my energy trying to stop this country from slaughtering innocent human beings. I have been called every despicable name that small minds can think of and have had my life threatened many times.

That’s the kind of stuff, bordering on codependence, that made me tune Cindy out.

On the other hand, she’s right about a few things.

Casey died for a country that cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months…

Good-bye America… you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.

It’s up to you now.

Of course we’ll manage to go forth without Sheehan and I’m not trying to be snippy about that, only stating a fact. In the end, I feel the same way about her as I did almost at the beginning. What she said or did never moved me precisely because of the way she said and did it.

Poll: Americans Seeking the Anti-Bush for Next Prez

Buck Banks

When I was a kid, I used to read comic books where the plots explored alternate universes (apparently due to a lack of plausible plot ideas). In these alternate comics, Superman would use his powers for evil and was a really unlikeable character, etc. In a recent Zogby poll, it appears that, after nearly two terms of George W. Bush, Americans are ready for their own version of an alternate universe, one featuring the anti-George. You know, someone with diplomatic, managerial, verbal and math skills:

On the traits most important to voters, the front-runners of both parties — Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican Rudy Giuliani — were deemed well-equipped to deliver.

The results suggest that Americans are looking for strong, unifying leadership skills both at home and abroad. About eight in 10 said it was very important to elect a “competent manager” and someone who could “bring the American people together.” Also very high on the priority list: someone who could take charge of the military, promote the United States’ image abroad and demonstrate “personal morality.” Lower on the list of priorities were party loyalty and resume-oriented measures such asbusiness, diplomatic or legislative experience.

On the traits most important to voters, the front-runners of both parties — Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican Rudy Giuliani — were deemed well-equipped to deliver. They were the top two out of 19 prospective candidates characterized as competent managers. On foreign policy matters, Clinton topped the list, with 24 percent saying she could best promote the U.S. image abroad; Giuliani came in second with 16 percent.

Who’d most likely be a “uniter, not a divider,” for the American people? Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., came out ahead of Clinton on that measure, tying Giuliani for the top spot with 22 percent. But when it comes to uniting partisans on Capitol Hill, more respondents had faith in Clinton (19 percent) than Obama (15 percent).

On the Republican side, Arizona Sen. John McCain’s military experience is still his greatest asset, with one-third saying he’d be the best candidate to command the armed forces.

Meanwhile, the “moral values” question remains Giuliani’s Achilles’ heel. Only 6 percent of respondents said he displayed personal morality, while McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) registered in the teens. In a CBS News/New York Times poll last week, 37 percent of respondents said they did not think Giuliani shared the same values as “most Republicans”; the same percentage said he does. But in that poll’s primary matchup, Giuliani still topped McCain and Romney among Republican voters.

Stats Show DHS AWOL on Terror – Biggest Catch To Date Is the Guy Who Didn’t Kill JonBenet

Jon Ponder

Katrina-ization of terror: A report released on Monday by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a thinktank based at Syracuse University in New York, details the types of immigration cases filed by the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) since 2004. The results are startling:

It shouldn’t be surprising that an administration that retooled the Dept. of Justice into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican National Committee would play politics with homeland security.

[Out] of [814,073] cases filed in federal courts by the Department of Homeland Security since 2004, only 12 were related to terrorism. Another 112 cases were filed using national security charges…

[The] report found that 86.5 percent of all cases involved some sort of immigration violation, such as entering the United States without inspection, not having a valid immigrant visa or overstaying a student visa.

If this is true, DHS officials and the Bush administration have been lying to Congress and the public about what DHS has been up to:

[TRAC co-director David Burnham] said the agency continually sells itself as a central player in the war on terrorism.

“Despite the repeated statement by the DHS that stopping terrorism and preventing serious crime are its core missions, the record shows that since the DHS was established in the wake of 9/11/2001, most of the agency’s actual work recorded in the Immigration Courts has focused on traditional immigration matters,” concluded the report.

According to calculations by another source, the 12 terror cases filed since 2004 show that only 0.0015 percent of DHS cases have been terror-related. Is it really the best use of precious resources to have routine immigration cases being filed by DHS?

This smacks of the sort of gross incompetence (and lying about it) we have come to expect from this administration, but much more alarming is the fact that DHS turned up missing in the investigations that thwarted a pair of high-profile terror attacks in this country over the past few weeks. The department’s glaring absence from these investigations appears to stem from the Bush administration’s other persistent bad habit: politicization.

In April, a rightwing terrorist was caught before he blew up a woman’s health clinic in Texas. Last week, a planned bomb attack on ultra-rightwing protesters at the funeral of Republican political agitator Rev. Jerry Falwell was uncovered and a militant rightwing student at Falwell’s Christian college was arrested. Both cases were handled primarily by local and state law enforcement, with minor assists by non-DHS feds.

What has politics got to do with DHS being AWOL in these investigations? It is in the interest of the Bush adminstration, whose base is dominated by Christian extremists, not to give the public the opportunity to connect the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists Bush uses as his bogeymen — and whom DHS was ostensibly set up to fight — with the domestic Christian fundamentalist terrorists in our midst, even though both Islamicists and Christianists have the same ultimate goal: the establishment of theocratic states.

In fact, the only high-profile arrest that has involved DHS to date was the capture last August in Thailand of John Mark Karr, the emotionally disturbed man who falsely claimed to have killed child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey. DNA tests later excluded Karr as a suspect in the murder.

Capturing child predators is important work, but it’s hard to see how it falls under the purview of the agency tasked with protecting U.S. terrority from terror attacks.

It isn’t surprising that an administration that retooled the Dept. of Justice into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican National Committee would also play politics with homeland security. After all, Bush appointed a prime political hack, Michael Chertoff — whose previous high-profile gig was as a Clinton-hating talking head in the 1990s — as its cabnet-level leader. So, unfortunately, it won’t be any less surprising if we find out the hard way that no one in the administration gave any thought to the downside of politicizing DHS.

If the unthinkable were to happen, and terrorists, foreign or domestic, successfully attacked the homeland while DHS was busy filing routine immigration cases or tracking pedophiles overseas, this situation could be transformed in an instant from a typical bureaucratic boondoggle into a tragedy of historic proportions.